


Hello

by jonghyunnie (markothy)



Series: my moon and galaxy [1]
Category: SHINee
Genre: Implied/Referenced Suicide, Other, i don't know how else to tag this i'm sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-18
Updated: 2018-05-18
Packaged: 2019-05-08 14:12:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14695851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/markothy/pseuds/jonghyunnie
Summary: Picture yourself at 11 years old - this was my age when I first met Jonghyun.※ this piece is personal and bittersweet, about growing up and grieving. this piece mentions the 18th in detail, so if this is something that might easily trigger or harm you in any way, please do not read. i understand completely.





	Hello

**Author's Note:**

> __  
> **※ please, please do not force yourself to read this if you're not ready.**  
>  this is a piece i wrote in early february as a journal assignment for an english composition class. the prompt was to choose a song loaded with memories and write about it. i've only let close friends and my professor read it. i'm only even considering posting it now as another means of releasing my grief, much like the release it was to write this.
> 
> not only is this the story of how i found shinee, this is the story, if only in little vignettes, of my life with shinee (and specifically, jonghyun).
> 
> **※ once again, please read with discretion.**

Picture yourself at 11 years old - this was my age when I first met Jonghyun. You’re sprawled out on the couch, doing what 11-year-olds do. At this particular moment, you’re fooling around with your 3DS on a program called Flipnote Hatena. It’s a cutesy looking program that allows its users to create flipbook animations of whatever they can possibly imagine. Once they’re done, it can be stored away for no one but themselves to see, or it can be shared online, alongside thousands of other similar, yet wholly unique animations.  
  
Picture in your mind that aimlessly browsing this online gallery is currently your 11-year-old self’s best method of entertainment. You click through the gallery’s top-rated flips, hoping to yourself that someday your mediocre flips will make its way to that gracious list. As you click through the flips, some of them being amateur, but popular, visual novels with a new update, animation covers of popular songs, or 15 second loops of cartoon cats dancing to a funky jingle, you begin to play a flip that catches your attention. As aforementioned, it’s one of those animation covers, but the song isn’t one you’ve heard before. You’re almost positively sure the song isn’t English, either.  
  
Nonetheless, picture yourself, as your stylus taps the play button, because the art style looks cute and promising. After it’s done, you pause. The animation was cute, you think, in your experienced, 11-year-old art appraiser opinion. However, the more important quality was the song. You tap your stylus once more, and the clip plays again. Yes, there is definitely something attractive, something addicting about these voices. You curse Flipnote Hatena for having such a short audio clip capacity as you tap the replay button a few more times. Since you’re 11, you don’t think much of it – until, _oops!_ The flip has downloaded its way into your personal, offline flip gallery, where you can access it whenever you can. And believe me, you _do_ access it as much as you possibly can, playing that approximately 15 to 30 second clip over and over again, because you can’t get the melody, those voices – five of them, you think you hear – out of your head.  
  
Picture yourself at 11 years old, reaching your wit’s end because of that song. You take time away from your 11-year-old duties to search the lyrics, or what you think they are, on Google. You fumble with them, as you’re aware they’re not English, but can’t find a better way. Google tells you a variety of things, but mainly that you’re wrong and need to try the search again. So, you do. This time, a list of video links appears on the screen. Slowly, you scroll through the results and automatically stop at the first one that isn’t that one Beatles song. The thumbnail appears as a young man clutching his chest, perhaps dramatically singing in his bedroom. You relate well with that visual. You click the thumbnail and it takes you to the YouTube video. Immediately, you are hit with fierce delight and intense resolution: the beginning notes are an exact match to your favorite little flip. You have found the song you’ve been searching for, appropriately named Hello by a five-member Korean boy group called SHINee. You’re not sure what to think besides, _“Wow, that guy in the ugly leopard print sweater looks like a jerk.”_ You are 11 years old and you are unaware of the impact this will have.  
  
In the following days, weeks, months, since that fateful moment, at a spry 11 years old, you become acquainted with this myriad of youthful, dancing boys called SHINee. You find yourself remembering their names, trademark quirks, and appearances with relaxed ease despite your initial, frustrated cries of, _“They all look the same!”_ You know that Onew is the oldest, Jonghyun is the spunkiest, Key is the most stylish, Minho argues the loudest, and Taemin is the youngest. You pick a favorite, let’s say it’s Jonghyun – the one you thought looked like a jerk. You quickly rescind that previous comment. By the time you're racing into a newer, bigger interest, you have a boatful of knowledge you have no idea what to do with. So, you hold onto it and store it for a rainy day.  
  
Picture yourself at 15 years old, sitting in a room trimmed with dark wood. Next to you on the drab, pillowy leather couch is your mother, trying to quiet her sobs with the back of her hand but she’s failing miserably, and your father, stunned into silence. Across from you, behind her mahogany desk, sits your psychotherapist – she speaks through thinly pressed lips of your concisely described suicidal ideation, and has just suggested, no, demanded, _pleaded_ , that you be sent to Four Winds immediately.  
  
You’re admitted into a ward, one for minors, called Polaris, where you stay for the duration of Thanksgiving break. You sob the first night, terrified of living in a new, scary place. You’re not allowed to use your phone while living at the facility, so you have to make due with your old, lime-green iPod Nano. You softly ask the nurse on hall duty to get it out of Sharps for you. You return to your room to wedge yourself into where the window wall and the dresser wall meet atop your shale slab mattress and scroll through your inventory of songs. It’s all songs you used to listen to, like songs from Disney’s Top 40, video game soundtracks, and your mom’s favorite country music. You sigh, curse something to yourself, and continue scrolling. The dial stops on a song you thought you forgot - upbeat, cute, and Kpop: SHINee’s “Hello.” The song plays, and as you calm your leaky faucet eyes, you stare out the curtainless window and shiver. You play this song on repeat until they come to take the iPod back to Sharps for the night. This, along with a few of their other songs, is the song that gets you through the week.  
  
Finally, picture yourself at 18 years old. You’re waking up to the morning of December 18th. You graduated high school last spring and successfully completed your first semester of college. You’re on break until mid-January, so you have endless time to kill. With almost no hobbies outside of academics, being the good student you are, you’re getting very bored and very restless. Last night left you tossing, turning, and waking up at odd hours. You’re plagued with nightmares, and when you wake from them each time, something doesn’t feel right. You don’t know how to place it quite yet. The process of falling back to sleep for you is long and treacherous.  
  
When you wake up, again, and decide that you’ve tried sleeping enough for one night, it’s around 9 AM. That off-putting feeling in your gut is still there. Soon, you’re awake enough to register the buzzing of your phone - one, two, three, four, continuously, all in sequence. It’s not usual for you to get this many notifications, especially not in the morning. You reach over to calm your little, buzzing infant - input the passcode, swipe the screen, scroll through the notifications. Some are from Snapchat, which you habitually swipe away and ignore, some are from Twitter, which you swipe away claiming you’ll ‘check those later,’ and finally, some are from Kik Messenger. 45 of them, in fact. In the message preview, it is your friend Bjorn, yelling your name in all caps and asking if you’re alright, where are you, please be alright. This confuses you - of course you’re alright. You just slept in a little longer than usual. You open the message and as expected, there’s a spam of messages from Bjorn - this isn’t unusual; he lives in Belgium, a whole six hours ahead of you. However, the messages are a variance of garbled hysteria. You scan through them: _‘JONAH ARE YOU OKAY,’_ _‘PLEASE BE OKAY,’_ _‘PLEASE ANSWER ME,’_ and _‘WHERE ARE YOU RIGHT NOW.’_  
  
You’re not sure what to do but text back, so you do. ‘What’s happening?’ You type out and hit the send button. You’re briefly met with _‘Bjorn is typing…’_ at the top of the screen as you wait for a reply. _‘Jonghyun,'_ and _‘I thought you heard the news already,’_ and _‘I’m so worried about you,’_ flash across the screen. Your heart plummets, much like the phone in your hand, to the floor. You fly to your desk, furiously shaking your computer awake. Clicking open a new tab, you type _‘Jonghyun’_ into the search field. Google auto-completes it with _‘death.’ ‘Jonghyun death.’_ You feel yourself shaking, feel yourself mumbling, chanting _‘No,’_ like a prayer as you skim through news articles. You feel yourself slipping as your eyes dart over the picture of your hero, your inspiration, pouting back at you and read in bold font,  


_**“SHINee's Jonghyun found dead.”** _

Picture yourself at 18 years old, crumbling to the floor because your legs have forgotten how to work. Your chanting has escalated into sobs, wails, and you hear the thuds of your mother running to your room. You can’t feel anything. Your breath comes in gasps and there’s a piercing pain in your chest. You hear your mother whimper above you, asking if you’re alright, asking what happened. A parent should never have to see their child weep with such anguished abandon. One sob-distorted word after another, and a few vague gestures to the article still open on the computer screen, you manage to convey a code your mother can decipher. She looks at you with a face of profound, endless pity. Above you, she opens and closes her mouth a few times, searching for what to say - through the tears flooding from your eyes, she looks similar to fish gobbling for air. With a faint whisper of _‘I’m sorry,’_ she leaves you alone to cry.

Picture yourself at 18 years old, struggling to move, to breathe, as your mind reels with questions that only sink the knife deeper into your heart. Only it’s not really a knife, no - that would be too simple. The universe’s instrument of choice this time is a searing, white-hot rod, piercing through your core, but instead of filling your chest cavity with blood, the wound is cauterized closed as quickly as it’s created. It hurts, and it hurts, and you feel like you’re suffocating.

You spend the 18th gorilla-glued to your computer. When it’s not your computer, it’s your phone - anything that will connect to Twitter, to your news sources. Within the hour, you learn it was intentional - a secluded, unknown officetel away from his routine locations, a frying pan full of charcoal left burning on the stove. You learn that his sister called for help, begged police to find him, find her brother, only for emergency response to locate him over two hours later. It hurts, it hurts, every new piece of information tears you apart from the seams, rips another agonizing wail from your lungs, but you can’t find it in yourself to stop. You feel that it’s your duty, the very least you could do, to stay by his side - the way he stood by yours.

When you finally work yourself up into a makeshift human again, pictures of the viewing, the wake, flower-coated casket, smiling portrait and all, are flooding your Timeline. The grief comes like tidal waves - it knocks your breath away, sends all your hard work of putting yourself back together scattering to the wind. They do not stop - they have not stopped.

Time moves forward, and you don’t know how you’re making it through each day. The burial is intended to be private, but there’s a livestream of the procession out of the funeral hall. You always imagined the five of them together for life, brothers formed through industry and art, and never like this, the four of them carrying the fifth for one last time. The hearse can’t even make it out onto the street through the hordes of press and paparazzi. Even in death, you think, these locusts won’t grant him peace. And even though you promised yourself and your parents, you still can’t pry yourself away from the constant stream of new information. It eats you from the inside out.

Unlike your friends and internet mutuals, though, who can’t seem to stomach listening to his voice right now, you take shelter in it like you’ve always done. Spotify seems to know your pain, and plays all your favorites. Every time you feel yourself sink into the depths of the waves once more, another song brings you back. It hurts more than anything you’ve ever felt before, but you still can’t help but smile. However, it isn’t until late at night when that you hear that one, sacred song play out its opening melody. It’s Hello by SHINee, and through the tears welling up in your eyes, you look up to the posters of your heroes, your boys, and especially, your Jonghyun. You smile, close your eyes in submission to sleep, and feel your heart begin to heal.

**Author's Note:**

> i cannot thank you enough for taking the time to read this. this piece makes me feel vulnerable, but i felt it necessary to share. 
> 
> no matter what stage of grief you, reader, are in, i hope we can heal together in due time. 
> 
> if you ever need someone to talk to, about anything, my twitter is [here](https://twitter.com/shiiningfive) and my curiouscat is [here](https://curiouscat.me/).


End file.
